This kind of goes to show that a thread can go on here without getting locked if there is enough interest in keeping it alive. Maybe that is the key then to keep a topic going: you have to to raise enough intrest in it somehow.

I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

I wouldn't like to say whether I'm agnostic or atheist. However, I think I have two key characteristics that brought me to my current view. The first is that I tend to think very precisely; natural languages are as rigorous as programming languages for me. With this, I noticed contradictions and inconsistencies where perhaps others let it wash over them and instead noticed either a confidence and safety in the way things were preached, or a safety in numbers because enough other people believed.

The second is that I consciously notice psychological effects things have on me, and at church, I felt shamed and didn't find that acceptable.

So, despite having gone to church in a time of loneliness and misery after years of rejection, and having wanted to give it every possible chance, and despite the congregation being full of nice people, the actual church experience as I underwent it pushed me away.

This is despite definitely having been brought up in a Christian culture. I went through infant school and came out with no clear distinction in my mind between bible stories and (do I need to say 'non-biblical' here, Edgar?) history.

Relatedly, I always wanted to believe in ghosts but couldn't honestly say I'd ever seen one, nor compelling evidence of one. In this case I find it unfortunate, since some of the best stories are ghost stories.

Back to agnostic vs atheist: certainly I believe that every possible religion we have on this planet was created by people and is subject to survival of the fittest just like animals: if a religion is popular, it's because it contains mechanisms that help it spread. This could be positive (they offer a lot of value) or negative (they brainwash, or they were forced upon people by dictators or some such), but either way, it's clear to me that these things are a human creation and have nothing to do with why the universe is here or other philosophical questions like that. So I'm atheist if we are talking about world religions, but agnostic in the sense that we don't actually know why the universe is here and we shouldn't just say there's nothing to it beyond what we can see.

I like to take religion out of the equation and ask myself: are we here because of a series of events that played out over a long period time or is there some entity that exists in our current unknown who is connected to us somehow? At that, the best I can do is choose one to believe in and make it known that I clearly don't know the answer to that question.

I've been stewing on that for a while and what exactly that means for each path.

When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

I dismiss all other "gods" because they're not worth worshipping. I know from experience the only true God is the LORD. I fully believe there are other "gods" out there, but as far as I'm concerned they're simply devils in disguise. Satan himself disguises himself as an angel of light.

12 And what I am doing I will continue to do, in order to undermine the claim of those who would like to claim that in their boasted mission they work on the same terms as we do. 13 For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. 14 And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. 15 So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds.

This goes out to you too, Bruce. Your experience in church was less than positive, and for that I am sorry. But you don't have to go to church to worship God, or to find acceptance. And you find God by seeking him with all your heart, and he will reveal himself to you. He sent his Son Jesus, his Living Word, to testify to himself. God is found in the Bible, and only coincidentally at some churches.

11 For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. 12 Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. 13 You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. 14 I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.

The second is that I consciously notice psychological effects things have on me, and at church, I felt shamed and didn't find that acceptable.

So, despite having gone to church in a time of loneliness and misery after years of rejection, and having wanted to give it every possible chance, and despite the congregation being full of nice people, the actual church experience as I underwent it pushed me away.

If you feel shame, it's either because you've done wrong, or because you haven't forgiven yourself for doing so. Jesus taught the forgiveness of sin upon repentance, and where sin is forgiven, it is no more, and should no longer weigh upon you. Jesus came to set us free, not to put us in chains.

31 So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” 33 They answered him, “We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say, ‘You will become free’?”

34 Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. 35 The slave does not remain in the house forever; ithe son remains forever. 36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. 37 I know that you are offspring of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you. 38 I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father.”

You use Windows 10? Well, I won't be able to play with whatever you built with UWP because I'm still on 7

---Febreze (and other air fresheners actually) is just below perfumes/colognes, and that's just below dead skunks in terms of smells that offend my nose.MiquelFire.red | +MeWindows 8 is a toned, stylish, polished professional athlete. But it’s wearing clown makeup, and that creates a serious image problem. ~PCWorld Article

I tried Windows 10, didn't like the aesthetics, didn't appreciate the feeling that Microsoft think they have a better idea of what I want to do than I do, and went back to Windows 7. This is true even on my home computer where I have 32 GB of which Windows 7 Home is only willing to use 16.

I know I'm not alone with this, so I would urge everyone to continue targeting Windows 7.

On a more serious note, here are some of the benefits I noticed upgrading to Windows 10:

All Windows 10 editions will use some number of TB of memory if you have it (contrast with Windows 7 Home which refuses to use more than 16 GB).

When you edit environment variables containing lists of paths, you get a nice editor with a list and Add/Edit/Remove/Browse buttons and whatnot. However, you can also get this on Windows 7 by installing something like RapidEE.

You can have multiple desktops, although it felt a bit weird to me.

I think there's a 'disable all notifications' mode, and although I can immediately see the benefit, I didn't really get into a situation where I wanted to try it out. You can also deal with this in Windows 7 by closing the programs that are notifying you (mainly e-mail).

That's all I can think of at the moment, and I think the final straw with Windows 10 was when I tried to copy and paste a number out of the calculator in 'programming' mode, and it put left-to-right directives in the copied string, which Visual Studio didn't accept and also didn't make visible. Well done Microsoft. For completeness, here are some more gripes I had with Windows 10:

Resizing windows: the cursor has to be within the window outline at the top, but outside on the other sides. It's just not consistent. There needs to be a visible border for dragging.

Too many places where Microsoft shoves content down your throat. My computer's job is to help me do what I want to do, not serve as a portal for Microsoft to push me around. Incidentally I have this gripe with much of the modern Internet and if anything, it has taught me the value of time off the grid.

My first encounter with Windows 10 was when a not-so-tech-savvy friend phoned me while he was doing the upgrade (I don't remember whether intentionally or not). He asked me "what boxes to check" during installation and this way he read me all the privacy-related settings over the phone. It was a really long list and I was like "WTF? I didn't see any of those in Windows 7".

When I've worked with it I've found it ridiculous that there's basically two variants of control panel. That means you have to look at two places when you're looking for a specific setting. Didn't spend much time with it, so maybe the brilliance just went past me.

I need a tool for merging several pdf files into one. After searching, I read somewhere that Windows 10 includes something for that. But then I found a tiny simple application that does the same. So I'm sticking with Win 7.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Years of thorough research have revealed that the red "x" that closes a window, really isn't red, but white on red background.

Years of thorough research have revealed that what people find beautiful about the Mandelbrot set is not the set itself, but all the rest.

Story time. Long ago, a village in Africa was terrorized by wild monkeys. Each night, they would ransack the villagers' homes--all except for that of the village baker. Curious, the chief approached the baker and asked him why.

When designing my computer for VR, I specifically opted for the minimum-specs system and OS so I could ensure that the game still worked consistently for others with the same minimum spec setup. The only spec I didn't leave at the minimum was the RAM, since I need more for development. But I had a bit of a time finding a Windows 7 Pro disk that didn't cost just as much as a Windows 8/10 disk (finally found a good physical copy on Bonanaza for under 30 bucks).

I hated the feel of Windows 8 as soon as I sat down to it, and only touched Windows 10 in store kiosks, so I'll be staying with 7 until (and possibly after) its EOL. It kinda sucks that I can't do some of the cooler games that I've seen (regular and VR) because they require UWP, but I think I can live without them for the time being.